A DIFFERENT DISTANCE

A DIFFERENT DISTANCE BY MARILYN HACKER AND KARTHIKA NAÏR

At first glance, A Different Distance might appear to grapple with what, right now, hits too close to home and persists still: the global COVID-19 pandemic—but Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr’s shared strength lies in the renga form, a genre of Japanese linked-verse poetry, which skillfully transports us back into those vestiges of beauty, devastation, confusion, and shared grief we all experienced and witnessed in March 2020.

Spanning a whole year from the start of France’s lockdown, these poems quietly haunt—offering the poets’ observations of street scenes and global news events when observing in isolation was all one could do. Naïr notices the juxtaposition of pigeons crowded together on sidewalks while humans on the same ground must heed social distancing. And Hacker gives voice to how we all once felt in our homes—a “perplexed self, desiring” while “home becomes exile.” The political unrest that continues to reverberate now, over a year later, arrives brilliantly in Naïr’s fine-tuned lyric—for example, a “national uncaring” towards the pandemic and disregard for the “nameless” became mottos of international governments. However, amid strained hope, Hacker and Naïr focus on those small glints of beauty, such as “every wave, every clap during our ‘locked-in’ days,” or as Naïr poignantly puts it—those “galloping months.”

Although the poems observe and reflect outward, their gazes are uniquely intimate, perhaps mirroring the witnessing and introspecting many of us did during the first phases of the pandemic. I can’t help but imagine that this renga practice between Hacker and Naïr provided some relief, consistency, and comfort to the poets during those early, difficult days. As I read, comfort it certainly did provide.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Shalini Rana

ALL THE NAMES GIVEN

ALL THE NAMES GIVEN BY RAYMOND ANTROBUS

Bold and tender, Raymond Antrobus’s poetry collection All The Names Given traces the speaker’s ancestry and places them in a family history filled with dreams, memory, and legacies tied to colonialism. These voice and narrative-driven poems bear witness to the gaps in language, speaking, and understanding—moving seamlessly through new poetic and visual forms in the pursuit of bridging and speaking to these gaps.

In our current times, when accessibility issues still prevail and communities begin to implement captioning, Antrobus redefines sound to focus on the experience of deafness. With poems and interludes written in captions that capture unexpected sounds, such as the “[sound of self divided],” he brings readers on a journey to interrogate the infinite possibilities of what sound can hold, drawing on the work of Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which inspired Antrobus’s use of captions. Language and white space play together deftly in these captioned sections, creating the necessary soundscape of silence and noise that emanates throughout these poems. And here, the poem becomes a space in which the speaker reckons with mythology, brutality, mirrors, mothers, fathers, surnames, and intimacy. Language, or the shaping of language into experience, is then the vehicle that transports us through this reckoning. By the end of the collection, we journey with the speaker into silence, something shared and transformed into a possible place of empathy. If Antrobus claims that there are “enigmas in my deafness,” then these poems feel like a palpable answering.

Tin House.

—Review by Shalini Rana

GRACELAND, AT LAST

GRACELAND, AT LAST: NOTES ON HOPE AND HEARTACHE FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTH BY MARGARET RENKL

Graceland, At Last, Margaret Renkl’s collection of essays from The New York Times, unfolds like a “patchwork quilt” of voices, stories, and perspectives from the American South, underscoring how the South is neither one entity nor one voice. Like a quilt, which brings “the past into both the present and the future,” these essays explore far-ranging themes, from flora & fauna to politics & religion, to better understand the strained times we’re living in, and how we must “make [ourselves] look” in a country that is as complicated and troubled as it is beautiful. 

We bear witness to the realities of religion, politics, and capitalism—and the real ways they fail us. Stories of animals and plants native to Tennessee, where Renkl lives, remind us of our responsibility to the natural world and the payoff of paying attention to the life we share this planet with. While these essays were written during the Trump presidency, and some during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Renkl illustrates more what has been gained rather than lost in our communities—much through the work and advocacy of people of color living in the South. Her essays on family and growing up in Alabama bring us back to our own heirloom stories, recipes, and holiday traditions, and what it means to feel the guiding hand of previous generations. The real treats of this collection are her essays celebrating the legacies of two influential Johns in American history: the late John Lewis and John Prine. While the book is not a how-to, we come away with how to better “belong to one another” in a time when we desperately need to.

Milkweed Editions.

—Review by Shalini Rana

THIS TOWN SLEEPS

THIS TOWN SLEEPS BY DENNIS E. STAPLES

Dennis E. Staples’s debut novel, This Town Sleeps, takes readers on a suspenseful ride that explores the intricacies of life in a small town by way of its hidden stories. Blurring genre categories, the novel shifts between multiple voices belonging to past and present residents of Geshig, Minnesota; and poetic techniques such as repetition and line breaks which texturize these voices throughout the narrative. The residents of this town carry multiplicities like the language used to describe them. For example, “the dead marble eyes” of one character, which “glower like a spinning nickel,” leaves the reader spellbound in suspense.

The novel opens with the main character, Marion Lafournier, having already left Geshig to live and work in a nearby area—an attempt to escape the jaws of small-town life. However, he finds himself returning to the “town with no dreams” for its love, rumors, community, and deep-rooted history—one that stakes its claim on Marion through the spirit world and connects him to his Ojibwe ancestry.

With a keen sense of humor and lightness, mysteries begin to reveal themselves and converse with themes such as friendship and childhood, intergenerational struggle, sexuality, and toxic masculinity. In investigating these ideas, the novel poses a genuine question: what makes a small town “sleep” and not dream? Is it the lack of a true “spirit” and a “bootstrap-strong” pride that fails to acknowledge progress? Through a meticulous weaving of backstories and present-day scenes, Marion and other characters who grew up in Geshig must come to terms with what it means to both resist and appreciate the place that roots them.

This Town Sleeps unfolds like a dream as we travel through time and voice—and discusses the consequences of escaping or never leaving one’s hometown while reminding us that “it’s better to wake up than fall back asleep.”

Counterpoint Press. 

—Review by Shalini Rana